Hawaii has an official goal of reaching 100% renewables for electricity by 2045. This will be a big challenge, since they don’t have a dispatchable source of clean power that can be scaled large enough. I don’t see them building large hydro projects in the mountains, and biomass and geothermal have actually decreased since 2011. Solar + batteries might work for individual homes, if they have enough solar panels, but scaling that up for all of the hotels (large tourism industry), businesses, industry and military installations will be more of a problem.
Yeah, they have a LONG way to go. There will have to be huge investments in a lot of different technologies to get there.
At Princeton Univ., where they have a 2046 target of net zero emissions, they are moving forward with plans for massive geo-exchange facilities to move away from their current natural gas fired power plant with co-heating. They expect to have over 1,000 boreholes averaging about 850’ deep into which they will dump heat in the summer and retrieve it in the winter using heat pumps to heat and cool university facilities. Ground source heat pumps like this are vastly more efficient than air source heat pumps and radically cut the amount of energy consumed to heat and cool buildings and potentially produce hot water too.
Large investments, like this, in radically improving the efficiency of energy use is probably going to be required for Hawaii to meet their goals.
https://facilities.princeton.edu/sites/facilities/files/geoe…
Perhaps floating offshore wind turbine technology can be used, or tethered wind power that operates far above ground? With the volcanoes in Hawaii, geothermal seems promising for re-expansion of use.
Where there is a will there’s a way, and with ~$.35/kwh prices on electricity, Hawaii is a great place to push hard for new cleaner energy technology that will be cheaper in the long run, though will require big investments up front.